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My (Step) Father's Will (I) · Mar 24, 11:59 PM
Last February 12th marks the first anniversary of my (step) father’s death, in Houston, aged 82. I use the parenthetical construction because, while LRD was not my biological father, he adopted me when he married my mother. Not once did my mother, who died in 1987, speak to me of my “real” father, though I know, because I was five years old when the adoption took place, that my name was Raines before it was Duemer. My birth certificate, an official document with an embossed seal, says that my father is LRD. No mention of Mr. Raines. After the adoption, the first five years of my life ceased to exist. A veil of vagueness settled over my early childhood, a veil only occasionally ruffled when someone would remark that the short blue-eyed boy “looked like” the tall brown-eyed father. This always startled me. Looking back on it, I realize that such people must have known they were lying, but lied in order to contribute their little bit to the whole fake narrative.
As a youngster, I was not allowed to imagine my biological father & as I grew older, I can’t say I had any particular desire to track him down. When I was in my thirties there was a cultural shift & lots of adopted children began seeking out their birth mothers & birth fathers. I never got on that bandwagon, never rode that cultural wave. I just figured that Papa was a rolling stone. I had accepted the silence surrounding our family’s narrative. It was not a happy narrative. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy famously wrote that ”[a]ll happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’m not so sure. Though I would like to believe in our uniqueness, I think our unhappiness was compounded the usual ingredients or repression, dishonesty & failure to take responsibility for ourselves.
But I am more interested right now in my (step) father’s will than I am in the history of my family, because against my will I have been dragged into a legal proceeding that has me revisiting—& revising—parts of the family story I thought were settled. Like geological formations, narratives have a way of breaking loose when subjected to forces they cannot contain. And then there is an earthquake & the structure shifts & settles into certainty. The word will is both a noun & a verb, but even as a noun, it possesses two strong senses: will is both the human faculty of intending (Yeats contrasts it to the imagination) & a legal document that captures one’s intentions for one’s property after death. The problem is that we are, living & dead, in such sporadic control of our will in the first sense, that a whole legal apparatus has grown up in order to sort out the meanings we try to encode in the documents, called wills, indicated by the second sense. In the US, this apparatus is called Probate, in England, Chancery, an institution made famous by Dickens in his great novel Bleak House.
Now, my cause (a fascinating term of art) in the Harris County (TX) Probate Court No. 3 bears no resemblance in complexity or longevity to Jarndyce & Jarndyce: I am the only heir & the cause has not proceeded over generations, but only for a year. Nevertheless, there have been days when I begin to feel like the mad old woman who lodges with Mr. Krook & who haunts the Court of Chancery waiting for her judgment. She has been waiting so long that she conflates her anticipated day of judgment with The Day of Judgment in the book of Revelations, & the Chancellor’s great seal, with the sixth seal of that apocalyptic book. And though no vast inheritance is being ground up by legal fees, as in the novel, – my (step) father left more in debts than in assets – the majority of those small assets will be used to pay lawyers rather than creditors of the estate, such as it is. And if I could bill my time at $250 an hour, the estate of my late father would owe me more than it owes even the lawyers, but in a fine twist of institutional & legal logic, the heir is presumed happy to waste his time upon the meaningless trafficking in notarized affidavits.
[To be continued.]
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— Pam 03/30/2006 03:05 PM #
— jd 03/30/2006 06:59 PM #